Farah Stockman of the New York Times on rural voters

Stockman, a member of the New York Times editorial board, has written twice recently--albeit briefly-- about rural voters.   Both entries seems to have been prompted by recent discussions of two books I've highlighted here in recent weeks, The Rural Voter and White Rural Rage.  Read prior posts here, here, here, here, and here.

Stockman's most recent entry, published yesterday, is titled, "Rural Voters are More Progressive Than Democratic Voters Think." Here are some excerpts: 

If you caught the scathing takedown of the book “White Rural Rage” in The Atlantic, then you’re aware of how intellectually dishonest it is to single out rural voters for special contempt. It’s also politically foolish, as a new poll by Rural Democracy Initiative, which will be released to the public in May, illustrates.

* * *

“It’s really clear that Democrats have a significant work to do to rebuild their brand in rural America, but that investment could pay dividends for Democrats, not just in the future but this year,” Patrick Toomey, a partner at Breakthrough Campaigns, which conducted the survey, told me.

In an election in which a few thousand votes could decide who wins the presidency or controls the Senate, it’s foolish to write off rural America.

The recent related entry is from March 1 and is titled "Rural Voters Aren't the Enemy."  Here's an excerpt that leads with a quote from Anthony Flaccavento, who ran unsuccessfully as a Democrat for congress in southwest Virginia and now runs the Rural-Urban Bridge Initiative:

“That kind of the language — a book by that title — is absolutely the kiss of death for the efforts of so many of us in rural areas who have been working to rebuild trust and reverse some of the policies that have hollowed out rural America,” said Flaccavento, whose group has put out a report about what Democrats have to do to win in rural America. He also said he feared the book would serve as confirmation to liberals that it’s hopeless to invest politically in those parts of the country.

Shawn Sebastian, director of organizing at Rural Organizing, an Ohio-based group that supports progressive campaigns in rural areas nationwide, agreed that support for authoritarianism is a growing problem. He just published a survey of his group’s 75,000 members — more than 800 Democrats, most of whom live in Trump-supporting rural areas, filled it out — which found that 25 percent had experienced political violence or threats of political violence.

“That was chilling,” he told me. But he also said rural voters are part of the solution and that giving up on them will only make things worse.

Stockman concludes that entry: 

Rural people working together to save their hospitals, build a nursing home or establish a mobile food pantry are the antidote to the violent polarization that everyone is worried about.